The Ethics Of Greed #2 - The Amazon Studios Model

Those who work – yes, I said “work,” and I meant it – in the entertainment industry (itself not always known for high ethical standards) value the talent, hard-won skill, time and sweat that goes into creating an engaging and marketable entertainment product. They know that creating entertainment (especially film and video) is an extremely complex process involving collaborative skills from many people, and they are prepared to underwrite the effort monetarily and with their own time, effort, talent and sweat. Film-making is not easy, and it will never be easy, and despite the relative cheapness of digital process over film, it will never be cheap. This fact dictates that the film and television industries basically run on money. That is true whether you are talking about the biggest mega-budget special effects extravaganza or the smallest independent talk-talk flick shot around someone’s dining room table.

On the other hand, the Amazon Studios outlook and plan is textbook internet. The aim of all internet platforms is to attract traffic, pay little or nothing for it, and to make money by converting that traffic into sales or advertising dollars somewhere along the way – either by front end sales offerings, advertising on its site, or through the back end by referrals to other sites or sales of user demographic information and email lists. The mindset dictates that content itself is something that must be obtained and maintained without cost if at all possible. It is an economic imperative to most internet ventures.

Amazon, and it seems every other platform out there that founded first as an internet platform, is simply ill-equipped to appreciate the fact that quality entertainment is going to cost them money. They have been trained into refusing to pay for anything – even a mega-budget company like Amazon.com. It’s not that they’re stupid (some would argue), it’s that they are too stubborn to see the bleeding obvious. To give them the benefit of the doubt, it may also be because they are too inexperienced in entertainment to appreciate what is good. That would be forgivable if it weren’t that they are at the same time too arrogant to hire people actually qualified to create entertainment products.

Is it plain to you that these two mindsets cannot successfully coexist? Simply put, internet ventures want quality entertainment product for free, but that is exactly what they cannot have. It doesn’t exist and never will exist because quality entertainment product can never be created “for free” (in another blog, I’ll go over the various platforms out there – youtube, vimeo, bliptv, howcast, nextnewnetworks, etc. and show you how they make the same mistake as Amazon.com).